Quote:
Originally Posted by EowynCarter
Well, 3 months later, I might have totally forgotten about the book and not buy it at all 
Most people not already kobo user will just wait or not buy the book at all. So what does kobo win there ? |
I dunno, but (ahem) BAEN sells eARCs for months (exclusively at their store) before releasing the books in question to Kindle, Nook, et al. It doesn't seem to hurt them.
Many indies do a three month exclusive with KDP select before doing broad distribution and most do it repeatedly so it doesn't seem to hurt the bottom line.
The practice is common in music and console gaming, despite the fanboys that routinely raise a ruckus when XBOX gets a timed exclusive.
Timed exclusives, when the terms are appropriate, are net wins for both partners. (For assorted values of "appropriate". YMMV, as usual.) And experience has shown that 3 month exclusives don't appreciably reduce sales; the extra income or promo effort from the partner more than offsets the loss of short-attention-span customers or hurt-feelings boycotters.
Longer exclusives do tend to hurt the bottom line but three months are no biggie. Especially when compared to helping the author-publisher find a reliable translation team to produce a quality foreign edition that might not exist at all without that assistance. Smart business move on both ends.